South, by Frederick Wight (1935) attempts a panoramic view of a South Carolina city. Negro characters are only slightly sketched domestics or levee workers. Mob terror threatens the Negro section at one point, but is averted when the victim is discovered to be a light-colored Negro woman. The manufacturing town of “Tuttle,” North Carolina, comes to life in Where the Weak Grow Strong by Eugene Armfield (1936). Negro characters are drawn with attention to truth more than to tradition. A servant asking for her six weeks back pay of twelve dollars, is called an “ungrateful nigger” and is ordered from the house.
Miss Evelyn, you ain’t got no call to talk to me like that. I only ast you for what I worked for. I may be a nigger like you says. The Lord made me the color I is. But I ain’t never done nobody out of the money that’s coming to them.
A white mother resents the reserving of the carnival merry-go-round for Negroes, during the supper hour for the whites: “They ought not let them do it.” A love affair between a Negro man and a white woman is told with quiet, tragic realism.
Incidental Characters, But Real. In George Milburn’s sharply observed Oklahoma Town (1930), “The Nigger-Lover” tells of a lawyer who earned his nickname by urging Negroes to vote, who violated taboos such as handing a Negro boy a glass of water from a soda fountain, and who is among the first victims in a race riot. In “The Nigger Doctor” the educated physician makes the town uneasy by his quietly defiant manner and his scientific skill. No More Trumpets (1933) contains a story “white Meat” in which a boarding house keeper gets her greatest delight in baiting Negroes and describing a lynching she saw as a girl. Deserted by her resentful daughters, she reveals that their father had Negro blood. In Milburn’s novel Catalogue, the lynching of a Negro is shown to be one of the holiday excitements for Oklahoma yokels.
James T. Farrell, in his trilogy Studs Lonigan (1935), has old man Lonigan commenting on Amos and Andy:
You would have laughed yourself sick at them. They’re so much like darkies. Not the fresh northern niggers, but the genuine real southern darkies, the good niggers ... with long names and honors, just like in real life.... Golly, Bill, they sure are a card.
In bitter contrast, however, Farrell shows the anger of the Chicago Irish to the encroaching black belt. Studs Lonigan believes that “they ought to hang every nigger in the city to telephone poles.” Fellow victims of poverty, the Negroes and Irish have fierce street fights of which the riot of 1919 was a natural climax, although Farrell describes the present as similarly explosive. Except in a few stories, Farrell does not present individual Negroes, but he has given powerful and grimly true pictures of northern prejudice, which seems to be little different from the lynch-spirit of the South.
William Faulkner’s Sartoris (1929) has many minor but ably individualized Negro characters. Uncle Simon’s dismaying first automobile ride, and his difficulties as treasurer of the church board—“he jes put de money out, sort of,”—are well described. Simon rebukes his son Caspy, who, home from the World War is bragging too much: “What us niggers want ter be free fer, anyhow. Ain’t we got ez many white folks now ez we kin suppo’t?” The servants of the tragic family in Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury (1920)—Aunt Dilsey, hobbling about her kitchen, impudent and bullying, with her temper worn short by the bickering and turmoil, Uncle Job, and Luster, who is guardian to Benjy, the idiot of the family—are likewise convincing. The Negroes are generally described from the point of view of their harassed white folks:
Like I say the only place for them is in the field, where they’d have to work from sunup to sundown.... They got so they can outguess you about work before your very eyes.... Shirking and giving you a little more lip and a little more lip until some day you have to lay them out with a scantling or something....
The Negroes themselves are an unflattering chorus in this drama of the fall of a family. One of them expresses their surliness: “I works to suit de man whut pays me Sat’day night. When I does dat, it don’t leave me a whole lot of time to please other folks.” Insolent just up to the breaking point, contradicting their white-folks without apologies, these servants are miles away from the plantation tradition menials. If familiarity has not bred contempt, it has at least bred rough irony in place of worship.